Jeff Nyquist and Alex Benesch talk about Russian occultism and it being at the core of Russian imperialism.
Transcript:
Nyquist: Hey, this is Jeff Nyquist with another edition of Friends and Enemies. I’m in the United States and my co-host Alex, Benesch is in Germany. We’re going to talk about Russia and occultism and how it links to everything. And perhaps the person to mention, first of all, is Alexander Dugin. He refers to himself as a philosopher, and he’s accepted as such, but he’s really just an instrument of Russian strategy.
He’s sometimes described as Putin’s brain. But as we discover in his writings, Dugin wants to bring about the end of days, which is a very creepy kind of notion. And I’ve got a quote about this. It’s from the fourth political theory. It’s from his book. Dugin wrote If the fourth political practice is not able to realize the end of times, then it would be invalid.
The end of days should come, but it will not come by itself. This is a task. It is not a certainty. It is active metaphysics. It is practice. He almost says it’s magic, right? It’s occultism. How? Where did Dugin get this end of days thing? Well, he was part of something. The end of days was the grand objective of something called Iuzhinskii.
His circle from whence he emerged long ago. It was a group of Russian occultists born out of the 1960s working to bring back the antediluvian golden age. They would follow in the footsteps of Nimrod in the construction of the Tower of Babel. In fact, Dugin has attempted to intellectually link all cultures and traditions according to the formula of what he calls traditionalism.
This is kind of a borrowing from Julius Evola. Only the Western tradition debunked as liberalism is excluded from Dugin’s Russian project. According to Dugin the Atlanticists, that’s the West, must be destroyed and their territories absorbed. Of course it’s no accident that Dugin is one of the foremost voices advocating the invasion of Ukraine.
He’s violently attacked Ukraine from the beginning and he’s advocated this is part of the last war of the world. Of course, the enemy is North America, Great Britain, Australia, Japan, the west. And of course, a little peninsula connected to that island is Western Europe. Dugin tries to appeal to traditional Christians, but he’s actually an occultist.
I knew a Russian who knew him back in the eighties. He was not just a cultist. He was a follower of Aleister Crowley, the British black magician. So maybe that is an introduction. And the fact is, Tucker Carlson, when he interviewed Putin in Moscow, actually met with Dugin in Moscow, there’s a video clip on YouTube.
Alexander Dugin talking about how wonderful it was, how he met and agreed with Tucker Carlson. And of course, Tucker Carlson was a Grateful Dead fan, so tell us about that a little bit, what that means.
Benesch: Well, there are interesting studies out there from academics that look into the new right wing movement. I mean, they always call themselves the new right wing. That’s been happening for decades. But that’s beside the point. It’s these new right wing guys getting into psychedelic drugs.
They are trying to achieve a re-enchantment. When the Enlightenment happened, you know, the age of reason, we figured out machines and we figured out chemistry and we figured out biology, we figured out what causes diseases and how to defend against that. A lot of people hated reason, and they thought of this as a disenchantment.
There is also these German terms for it, the Entzauberung. You take the magic out of everything or you keep people away from the magic, right? And what these cultists are trying to achieve is a re-enchantment of everything. The podcaster Joe Rogan talked about Tucker Carlson, because we know Tucker Carlson was a fan of these 1960s rock bands like the Grateful Dead. They were heavily into LSD and various so-called philosophies and practices. And so the question, of course, is did Tucker Carlson at some point get into psychedelics himself? Did he get into occultism himself? Jordan Peterson has talked about these very themes, the reenchantment. We need to get people back to the old ways. And this will make people healthy and happy and all this stuff. Dugin may claim to be an Orthodox Christian. But the situation in Russia had been complicated because when Christianity was introduced in Russia, this was the eastern Roman Empire type Christianity.
And of course not just Christianity came to Russia. Also, these ancient mystery cults came to Russia and the people in Russia were already into shamanism, they were into old style paganism, all kinds of stuff. There’s even influences from India and Asia. The academic Christopher McIntosh says that the Russian language itself is close to Sanskrit to a to a degree, and so Dugin can claim to be in the Orthodox Christian realm, but this bleeds into all this other stuff, this older stuff that he’s really interested in. Dugin was trying to get into all sorts of occultism, even Nazi occultism, and he would try to find the common ground he wanted.
He wants to create a worldwide movement. This is supposed to be cross-border, international. And he doesn’t care if you’re into this one particular brand or the other particular brand. He doesn’t care as long as the common thread is part of it. And so that’s how you get this new right wing global occcultist movement, this re-enchantment.
Nyquist: Charles Upton wrote a really thick book, a great book on Dugin. And Upton was the guy that wrote this great book on UFOs; it is called The Alien Disclosure Deception. Upton pointed out that Dugin’s Christianity is basically a lie.
It’s not honest. And then it goes back to the Iuzhinskii circle. The political philosopher Eric Voegelin would say he was dedicated to a magnetizing of the Gnostic issue. It’s more like Marxism. This is why Duggin gets along with the communists, he has offices in communist China, gets along with Muslims, gets along with occultists. It’s because it is the destruction of being itself. It was Eric Voegelin who pointed out that people like Dugin or Karl Marx want to destroy the order of being itself, which is experienced by them as defective and unjust and through man’s creative power to replace it with a perfect and just order.
Sounds like utopianism. Sounds like Marxism. It’s destruction. It’s all about obliteration and destruction. And it also is about the decay. When you decapitate being you are a murderer of God, as in Nietzsche’s parable of the mad man who comes out. Nietzsche says, the madman comes out, throws down his lantern and says, God is dead.
And then he looks at the crowd that’s gathered around him and says, You have murdered God, right? Well, that’s Dugin’s crowd. Those are your occultists and the atheistic, nihilistic Marxists and the Nazis and so on. They’re trying to obliterate being itself because they’re not happy with the world. They want to be gods and start creation over with them as God.
Benesch: It’s rare to find an academic who really understands how dangerous this this all is, because usually these academics, they are oftentimes very forgiving towards the esoteric, the occult, the mystery cults, or sometimes they don’t want to step on anybody’s toes or they sometimes love it themselves very much.
But this quote here is from an academic who really gets it. And he says the psychological mechanism behind this outlook is clear. Committing monstrously evil acts opposes God’s will to the greatest possible extent. The perpetrator of these acts considers that such act of opposition to God’s will puts him on a level with God, because they involve treating God as a being who is not to be feared or obeyed.
And Dugin has proclaimed his allegiance to the left hand path of occultism which embraces hatred of the world, immersion in evil and destruction. His sympathy for the demonic way of looking at things as manifested in his praise of the Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo. He called him an artist of the cosmological God emissary and has a favorable attitude to the nuclear obliteration of the United States.
So they believe we are in this bad age. The Kali Yuga. We are in the Kali Yuga, and we have to bring the new age, the new era, and we need a lot of destruction to achieve that.
Nyquist: This is an ancient Hindu concept. The Kali Yuga is the dark age in ancient Hindu thinking. And of course this evil circle that Dugin was a part of, I was told they were into Crowleyism and there were the children of Soviet rocket forces generals in the circle.
Crowley’s book, Magick describes the most important part of magic. And I just wanted to read this because it’s rather shocking. It is Chapter 12. This is in book four of Magic in Theory and Practice. It’s called “Of the Bloody Sacrifice and Matters Cognate”.
It is necessary for us to consider carefully the problems connected with the bloody sacrifice for this question is indeed traditionally important in magic. Now, all ancient magic revolves around this matter. In particular are all the Assyrian religions. The rights of the dying gods refer to this, and then it goes on. Those magicians who object to the use of blood have endeavored to replace it with incense.
And then he says, This is no good. He says the bloody sacrifice, though more dangerous, is more efficacious. And for nearly all purposes human sacrifice is the best. Then he writes the truly great magician will be able to use his own blood or possibly that of a disciple, and that without sacrificing the physical life irrevocably.
An example of the sacrifices is given in Chapter 44. There is a magical operation of maximum importance. The initiation of a new Aot, of course, is what we’re talking about the end of days, the destruction of being. And he says when it becomes necessary to utter a word, the whole planet must be bathed in blood.
And this is absolutely chilling. Imagine a ritual sacrifice in which nuclear weapons are unleashed. Imagine this mentality and this horrible war in Ukraine where innocent people are murdered and slaughtered when the Russians focus their missiles on killing innocents. Why? There’s no military purpose in destroying an apartment building.
There’s no military purpose in knocking down a restaurant or attacking a maternity hospital. But there is a black magical reason.
Benesch: And the literature on all this is difficult because you want scientific literature that is also very critical. But usually you just get one of those attributes. So you either get something that is scientific but very limp wristed or even very positive towards mystery cults and occultism. And then you get sort of the sensationalist books that make all these wild claims. But a lot of this stuff is not true. There was a time in this in the 1960s where you could have an instant bestselling book making things up about Nazi occultism. Nazi occultism was a real thing. And it’s very, very interesting. And it must be studied. But there were these hack authors that put out terrible books that sold a lot of copies.
And so usually you get one of these types of books. It’s either terrible quality or it’s scientific, but very forgiving. So here’s an example of somebody who is just in love with the subject. This is the book I read yesterday. This book is called Occult Russia by Christopher Mackintosh. It’s fairly new and he’s studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, and he studied German language at London University, later returning to Oxford to take a doctorate in history with a dissertation on the Rosicrucian revival in the context of the German Enlightenment and counter Enlightenment.
He’s in love with the subject. And for a scientist, I don’t think this is this is legit. I mean, to me, this is not legit. You need to have a very critical distance to all of this because his descriptions are so positive. What he’s saying is almost the self marketing of the shamans and the pagans and the occultists, because they always talk about how they want to improve men and create this better future.
But look at Russia and look at other places that were absolutely horrible. And these places have been horrible for such a long time. So where is all this good stuff they’re creating? It’s nowhere to be found. So we can pretty much say that the proof is in the pudding, the dark path, or what Dugin calls the left hand path of occultism seems to be the predominant path of occultism.
And then you get something like this. You have the English edition. I have the German translation here. This is Nicholas Goodrick Clarke’s “The occult roots of National Socialism”. He’s very critical, of course, but only when it comes to Nazi occultism. This book was first published in 1982, in London. And Mr. Clarke is from a very prestigious British university. And so he’s very forgiving when it comes to British, Freemasonry. And he seems like he doesn’t want to step onto anybody’s toes. He’s not shoving people under the bus that maybe should be shoved under the bus because you cannot really talk about Nazi occultism without talking about older German occultism, which means aristocrat occultism, and specifically some very old families that were, in staggering numbers, high ranking members of the Nazi Party.
So he talks about these specific Nazi characters and all that, but he’s not really getting into these high level nobility type characters who were very much into the occult and who also had vast intelligence networks that are really difficult to reconstruct and so this is like another example of, you know, scientists who are too tame, who are not really brave enough to step on to anybody’s toes. You can talk about Nazi occultism, because these historical Nazis don’t exist anymore. They are gone. So they don’t have any power. They cannot hurt you. But there’s so much more to it. So you just get a fraction, a tiny little window into all this stuff. And of course, Dugin heavily borrowed from Nazi occultism. And some of these other Russians, they heavily borrowed from German occultism.
Nyquist: And it traces back to romanticism. I likened Dugin’s project to magnetizing the Gnostic force which comes from Bergson’s metaphorical use of the term Gnostic to refer to this project, because Gnostics were people who were world rejecting. The basis of Dugin’d political philosophy is that the human is part spiritual and part material.
Marxism rejects the spiritual and embraces the material. Gnosticism rejects the material and embraces the spiritual. if you really look at Christianity, if you look at proper philosophy, it’s an embrace of both spirit and matter.
And when you reject one or the other, you create this pathology, this the psychological madness. Dugin’s circle was hermetic rather than gnostic. And that means magic. That means what we’re talking about with Crowley. Their aims coincided with Marxist aims. James Heiser is the biographer of Dugin. I recommend anybody to read it because it’s really amazing and what he points out is that basically Dugin got recruited by the KGB and the Soviet Library of the occult was open to him.
And this is a quote from Heiser that Dugin started in his youth working in the KGB archive where he gained access to and read large amounts of forbidden literature on masonry, fascism and paganism. So he was getting the occult knowledge from the KGB archives directly, right?
Benesch: Dugin was angry for a large part of his life. His father was a GRU officer.
Nyquist: I believe he made it to the rank of general. And then I think he got the boot. Because his son was embarrassing.
Benesch: And Dugin was always very angry that the communist leadership wanted to keep occultism in a small circle. They wanted to have the real good stuff, the really old stuff, and not share it. And Dugin was angry about that. And so when the wall came down, this was sort of the moment that Dugin wanted to seize. He wanted to create this mass movement. But for a long time, the communists wanted to keep this in a very tight circle, which is also what the Nazis did, because this is something that people oftentimes are not aware of.
And Nicholas Goodrick Clarke explains this very well in the book. Before the Nazis took over, there was a very large scene of occult lodges or orders. This was a bigger phenomenon, but when the Nazis took power, they wanted to keep the really crazy stuff in a tight circle, and they made all kinds of organizations illegal because they wanted to have full control over this stuff.
They wanted to incorporate elements into the SS. This was supposed to be structured and controlled by the leadership. This was not supposed to be a free for all movement where everybody can have his own order and his own occult lodge. They wanted to keep this very, very tight and even Hitler himself started to talk trash about the regular folk type of occultists.
He called them weak and he called it silly. And he made all these comments.
Nyquist: Hitler would make these disparaging comments about Himmler’s interest in the occult in front of other people, as if to distance himself from it. But but there’s reason to believe that he didn’t.
There’s a Felix Kersten who was Himmler’s doctor, and he decided to treat Himmler to save Jews and to save Dutchmen. He was a I think very much a lover of the Dutch and he was a Finnish citizen. And so Kersten treated Himmler every time Himmler would do crimes for Hitler. He would get these horrible abdominal pains and cramps, and the only relief he would get was Kirsten’s technique. Kirsten would try to minister to Himmler’s better Angels. And at one point, Kirsten was compelled to accompany him more on a trip with a with Hitler on a train. On Himmler’s train. And Himmler’s train had car in it. That was all a library on religion, on the occult.
And he was astonished at all of these books on theology and the occult. And he said, Why do you have all this here? And then Himmler said, well, I will let you in on a secret. We are going to make a new religion, basically, where Hitler takes the place of Jesus Christ. Which is is really shocking when you think about it. And the esoteric Hitlerism came after the war.
Benesch: And they had this whole program worked out, the Ahnenerbe, where they wanted to find or fabricate evidence that all these origins were Aryan, so they could lay claim to all of these things.
And Hitler was always about the next big thing. The first thing we can tell where he got into the occult was the Austrian magazine Ostara he collected, I think every single issue of it. And his philosophy echoed the Austrian magazine. But by that point, when he was gaining power, he was becoming a dictator, he had already moved on to bigger levels of of initiation. So he became incredibly fascinated with the Roman Empire and of course, places where he lived, such as Munich or places where the rallies took place, such as Nuremberg, which is right around the corner here. This was where the Roman met the Germanic. There’s the Germanic National Museum. Now, if anybody actually visits Germany, they should go to this this Germanic National Museum, because this is a mind blowing collection of things where the Roman Empire, the mystery cults, blends into the Nordic or Norse mythology and the Germanic and the Vikings.
It’s really something else. Far more grand than the earliest stuff that Hitler had seen. You know, the folkish lodges and all these type of groups. So he always wanted to get to the next level. And when you get to the next level, this is not something for public consumption.
Nyquist: Well, let’s talk about this next level for a second when it comes to Hitler, because I think there’s a parallel with Putin. And of course, Mao Tse-Tung was into the occult, which is interesting for for a marxist Leninist. There was the mentor of Hitler within the Thule Society, which was Dietrich Eckart. And now there’s a book and I got to recommend it. Steven Sage worked with the Holocaust Museum here in the U.S. He wrote a book called Ibsen and Hitler.
And you know what? Dietrich Eckart was famous for was he was the translator of Ibsen into German from Norwegian. Ibsen was a famous Norwegian playwright. You mentioned Hitler’s fascination with the Roman Empire and one of Ibsen’s plays is about Julian the apostate, right? It’s about Julian, the apostate, who was of course, a pagan Roman emperor amidst Christian ones on either side of him, who was going to try to peel back the Christian nature of the late Roman Empire. And this was one of Ibsen’s plays.
But all of Ibsen’s plays apparently had an occult subtext. The play “The Master Builder of Ghosts” is about syphilis. Sage’s discovery was that in Hitler’s speeches and his pronouncements, he plagiarized Ibsen. I kid you not, and he has page after page showing Ibsen.
And remember Albert Speer? You talk about Hitler’s favorite architect. The master builder is about an architect, right. And so he shows how the themes of architecture are in this this play. The master builder. Hitler actually tries to recreate elements in the play in his regime. There’s the play about a scientist who discovers the water is poisoned in in his town.
I think it’s called “Enemy of the People” or something like that. It’s about this guy who becomes the enemy. He’s trying to save everybody from the poison. And Hitler makes the Jews into the poison. So Hitler wants to remove the poison from the community. So every one of these Ibsen themes, he’s just obsessively following these. And it’s very strange that Dietrich Eckhart, who died shortly after the Munich beer hall putsch, said Hitler will dance. But we have written the music and he is going to follow what we have set down. It’s very odd. What do you have heard about this?
Benesch: Well, it’s sort of ingrained here. You can see that ingrained everywhere. I mean, when you go to a city like Ansbach, which is not far from here, you drive in your car and there is this building complex that now houses the government. It’s like this ancient, gargantuan temple. And you drive with your car on the main street and this thing goes on and on and on and on. If you build this thing today, it would probably cost north of a billion or maybe several billion. This stuff is ingrained everywhere. And when Hitler employed Albert Speer, Hitler wanted to create these outrageously large buildings because he thought it would provide him with some sort of immortality, he would mention that his health was bad.
You know, Hitler didn’t expect to live very long, and ultimately he didn’t. And he always said that in thousands of years people would look at these large buildings and they would remember him. But I think it was much more than just remembering him. I think he wanted to reach some sort of immortality through these buildings because he had very specific guidelines for them, the measurements, the order of things.
And this is very, very sophisticated for a man from a very, very simplistic background. So that indicates that Hitler was in contact with some very serious people from the aristocracy who joined the Nazi Party.
Nyquist: And by the way, for him to have copied, plagiarized Ibsen in his speeches, you can’t even doubt it.
It’s documented in Sage’s book. That Hitler would, as if it was ritual magic, try to conform to these plans, even to the fact that Hitler had syphilis. It’s just bizarre to see this play out and the thing that amazes me is of course through this magic, like Crowley points out, there’s blood, there’s killing people in order to create something that’s new by destroying everything that exists.
And this is what Hitler was doing, as well as what Putin’s doing. Marx calls it a philosoph. Look at Jinping and China. It’s crazy. They’re literally destroying their own economy and they’re leading themselves into what could ultimately be a nuclear war with the United States that would basically destroy China.
Benesch: In my view, Mao pushed this gigantic reset button turning China into an ancient society where you have the enlightened leadership and everybody else is a serf because some of these early communists in China, they thought you could do the transition in another way.
You could still keep some of the economy intact. You could keep some of the businesses and have some sort of, you know, modern trade and some other modern institutions. But Mao was very, very clear on this. Everything had to be turned back. Like you turn back the clock and the communists always claimed to do something very, very new.
But they borrowed heavily from something that was very, very old. There’s something here in the book by Nicholas Goodrick Clarke. It’s about Lanz von Liebenfels. One of the more important, known occultists back then. Lanz said that you can find the highest form of this occult power in the oldest aristocracy in Germany. So they had this idea of ten levels of enlightenment. And that first level is the individual. And the second level is the family, in this case, a Germanic Aryan family. And then you go up the ranks and they said that level number eight represents the high nobility, the very old families. Level nine was the kings, and level ten was what they call God or whatever dark force or demon they were into. So this is sort of the hierarchy they had. And so when we look at Hitler, Hitler at some point showed a vast knowledge of the occult. And at that point he had moved far beyond the stuff he was into years earlier.
And this only could have happened through knowing specific people because you cannot find the real old stuff, the real crazy stuff in a magazine like the Ostara that he was collecting. And so they wanted to create this new world, this new empire of Aryan Germanic super people. Everybody else would either be dead or a slave or a worker on some project.
And this sort of mindset is the same mindset that you see in communism and that you see in Dugin and all the other guys. And Dugin has created an international movement, this cross border, international movement, that says everything is bad now. Everything is rotten, everything is liberal, he says, and everything is falling apart. So we all have to take part in this transformation.
Nyquist: He’s taken Islam to traditionalism. He’s taken the alt right with whatever neo-Nazi elements there are in it. And he’s tried to create an international out of them that’s opposed to the liberal West. And it’s about this war of the world island and the end of days.
It’s very apocalyptic, but it’s always about destruction. And it’s the destruction of the West and it’s the destruction of the institutions of the West. And Russia is viewed almost by Dugin as an instrument for destroying this positive thing that exists and dragging it down and destroying it. When you look at what the Third Reich was trying to do and what the Soviet Union and communist China, Voegelin points out that all of these movements have a kind of similarity to them.
There’s a magical thinking that if you do these certain rituals or you do this destruction magically some new things are going to pop out of the ground. You know, if you destroy the bourgeoisie, you know, paradise is going to pop out of the ground or you destroy the Jews, paradise is going to appear.
Benesch: Germany for a long time was not a unified empire. It was sort of this patchwork of different mini kingdoms and principalities and all that stuff. And so then in the 1840s, 1850s, there was this big question what direction is Germany going to move towards.
And so you had early socialists, the early communists, you had some weird enlightenment groups. This was sort of a very ideological and also very religious battle, you know, what direction to take. And many problems existed in Germany back then. And of course these occultists use that very same argument. Everything is falling apart. We’re losing the magic, we’re losing the grandiosity.
We have to restore all that stuff. And here, for example, this is one of the rare spots in the book by Nicholas Goodrick Clarke about the occult roots of National Socialism, one of the few moments where the author is stepping onto some very powerful toes. He talks about this order, the Ordo Novi Templi. This was one of the important organizations in Germany back then, and he says that a Prince gave a lot of money to this order. Now people can look up this Prince, the families he belonged to. Very old families and very powerful. And they gave money to these right wing groups. And it was the time of modern anti-Semitism and all this bubbling anger that happened all over Germany. Very dangerous time. And back then, they didn’t have nuclear weapons. Back then, they didn’t have biological weapons. They didn’t have chemical weapons. But now these occultists do, so people should take this very seriously.
I tried to sort my notes in a chronological fashion about Russia. There are so many shamanic and pagan traditions in Russia. You know, Siberia, the Saami people in Scandinavia. And Putin himself seems to be interested in all that stuff. I mean, we’ve heard some rumblings that Putin likes to bathe in elk blood or some something like that.
And there’s actually an ancient ritual where you are standing in a sort of cave or in a hole and there’s a grid above your head. And so an animal is killed ritualistically on that metal or wooden grid. So the hot blood would pour down on you while you stand below. So we don’t know exactly if Putin did that specific ritual, but it’s something that Putin seems to be interested in.
And Christianity was introduced to Russia in the year 988. Now, this was the eastern Roman type of Christianity, and we can pretty much guess that some ancient mystery cults found their way into Russian territory. But even with the general population, the old pagan stuff continued to exist. The Russian Orthodox Church simply turned some pagan figures into Christian saints, so they would blend the old Russian stuff, with the Orthodox Christianity. They would sort of merge and assemble or do what was always common in the ancient world, where you just take over a new territory and you don’t tell the people that your religion is wrong.
You just blend their religion with yours. And incrementally you start to change the mythological history. So everything neatly fits together.
Nyquist: This is what they were trying to do by positive Christianity in Nazi Germany. It was an attempt to do this to Christianity under the Third Reich. To actually change it step by step. The goal being to replace Christ with Hitler. You could see what’s happened in the Protestant churches with liberation theology and social Christianity. You see it moving towards communism. You see it in the interpretation of the scriptures, the theology being changed.
Benesch: There’s a reason we have Christmas trees and we hide Easter eggs for the children. You know, this is not exactly a Christian tradition. So there’s a lot of stuff in Germany that was blended in, so to say, and some people in Germany never really adopted Christianity or they adopted it only on paper. And this is something that people need to be aware of when it comes to today’s Russia.
Now, on paper, they say like 80% of the population is Christian. But that’s all nonsense. That’s on paper. You are listed somewhere as having been baptized or whatever. But all over Russia, while this Christianity drive took place everywhere, people continued the pagan and shamanistic traditions, and sometimes, especially under communism, they had to go to the woods in seclusion to do all that, because it was not allowed in public or not to that degree.
So Russia was always very, very occult. It’s always been that way. It just was ebbing and flowing through time. And the Slavs, they took things from all kinds of old sources, even the Russian language itself is influenced by Sanskrit.. Christopher McIntosh, ou know, Mr. Oxford, he spends a whole chapter on that.
So even this Indian stuff came into Russia and Asian stuff came into Russia. He says that the biggest concentration of shamanism within Russia is among the Mongol tribes of Siberia. It says the Communists didn’t suppress the shamans as much as the Christian church. But there’s always a level of control.
A shaman announced in 2019 that God told him that Putin was a demon. So he traveled to Moscow, but he was put in a psychiatric institution as a punishment, right? So this is what happens to you if you violate, let’s say, the old Roman law. Now in the Roman Empire, you could pick and choose any sort of cult you wanted as long as you accept the super cult of the emperor. But other than that, you could pick and choose for a long time what mystery cult or whatever you wanted to participate in. But the moment you started to reject the Roman emperor, that’s when you got into trouble. This is why the early Christians got into a lot of trouble.
Nyquist: We’re bringing up the Third Reich in the context of Dugin and the occult and Russian occultism, that is underlying things in Russia. And it’s doubly curious that members of the circle that Dugin came out of started calling themselves the Black Order of the SS when they were led by the philologist Yevgeny Golovin and, Yuri Mamleev, who is a Russian mystic, a novelist described as a representative of esoteric aesthetics of evil. Just as Putin’s outward adoption of Russian orthodoxy is a disguise, we have to think that the adoption of Russian Orthodoxy by the Dugin circle was a disguise.
If they’re talking about the esthetics of evil. Even the given literature about Dugin doesn’t go into this. So many of the members of the circle won’t speak to the press, the ones that are alive. But Dugin explained in the fourth political theory that the classical Marxists consistently call for insanity.
And insanity is what Dugin is saying is effective. Actual insanity, madness is part of the gender reversal of the fourth political theory. And of course, he talks about gender reversal. This is before we even got that in the U.S. This was one of Dugins books, which is really weird, you know.
Benesch: Dugin even adopted an alter ego with the name of Hans Sievers, a reference to Wolfram Sievers, a Nazi researcher of the paranormal. Now, Wolfram Seavers was managing director of the Ahnenerbe.
This was sort of an institutionalized attempt to discover ancient sites and ancient knowledge and to create this universal claim to territories.
Nyquist: They were looking for Atlantis. They were looking around the high Himalayan plateau for some evidence of the origins of the Aryan race. And they were looking for the Holy Grail.
Benesch: They tried to find what they called Ultima Thule, like the ultimate place of origin of the Germanic Aryan race. They’ve tried to find Hyperborea, the mystery land that nobody has apparently found yet. But they wanted to create this impression that they had claims to vast amount of land and claims to these people. The Nazis had this obsession with race and your family.
You know, the Romans didn’t care so much what you looked like. The Nazis did. And this became a strategic problem for them because they treated all these people so badly that they conquered, whereas the generals would say: Shouldn’t we treat these people more nicely so they fight with us against the Communists, but Hitler wouldn’t have it. And there’s also a strain in Russia now where they glorify the Slavic people and they call that the master race.
And in this train of thought, they also think of white Westerners as the devil. Since the days of Alexander Nevsky, when he defended against the Germanic Teutonic orders. And so Alexander Nevsky became a saint like figure in Russian mythology. So the white people are the devil. If you look at communist films, you know, the early communist cinema, like the Alexander Nevsky movie, people can find that on YouTube these days.
You can see these white blond, devilish knights. And when they march and when they stand around in a procession and they torch these poor Slavic people, it pretty much looks like the stormtroopers from Star Wars. You know, the George Lucas movie. And George Lucas, by the way, actually said that he believes Soviet filmmakers had more liberty than American filmmakers. People can find that on the Web in like 2 seconds.
Nyquist: In Dugin’s fourth political theory, he says that white European males are the enemies of tradition, right? Because they’re the people who have brought us liberalism. And he saw that that white European males are the focus of evil. And he says you have to destroy whiteness and you have to destroy masculinity in this Western set. This is a quote from Dugin: We are now in this moment of possible postmodern re extension and the final breaking of gender of the stages of this break are feminism, homosexual reality and sex change operations, and then trans humanism. That’s an exact quote. So Dugin is advocating the inversion of sex, the destruction of man, white, European man by destroying the idea of sex, by inverting sexuality and then introducing trans humanity. And Putin postures as if he’s for traditional values, but his own brain, Alexander Dugin, was saying years ago in this fourth political theory, we need to invert sexuality, which in the last 20 years is what’s happened.
Benesch: Whenever there’s some craziness going on in the West, like the totally out of control trans movement and all that stuff, every time there’s something crazy in the West, the Russian propaganda will say that this shows the evil of America and American leadership. But there’s so much communist Russian influence in all of this. So it’s basically Dugin’s people doing this to us to a large degree. And then he says, look how bad the West is. You know, we have a better solution. We have this crazy occult transnational movement to take over the world.
And even during the communist era, there was a section of the Bolshevik party. They called themselves the God Builders. This was a group led by Alexander Bogdanov, co-founder with Lenin of the Bolshevik Party, Maxim Gorky, and Anatoly Lunacharsky. So they believe that religious myths and rituals and symbols were these powerful tools that can be used for socialism. Lenin was not a big fan of making this into a larger general movement. So apparently Lenin was a bit like Hitler wanting to have this really crazy stuff in a tight little group. You know, he didn’t want this at this stage. At least he didn’t want this to be a bigger movement. So this was sort of the fraction in the Bolshevik leadership. Now Bogdanov was driven out of politics, and he became obsessed with blood transfusion to prolong his life and to regrow hair. But at some point he messed up with a blood transfusion. In 1928. This didn’t go so well for him. Now, this Lunacharsky kept a position in the Bolshevik leadership and he became the first People’s Commissar for Education in the Soviet Union. So he wanted to bring all this occult stuff into the cinema, in the theater and the music and all the Soviet art. They call it socialist realism. All this stuff was very occult and also very anti-Western, anti white people.
Nyquist: The whole idea of the Bolshevik Revolution is having the lowest class, the proletariat, becoming the ruling class. It’s an inversion, just like turning men into women is an inversion. And what is Satanism? You do everything backwards. You invert everything and you pervert and you invert. And I think that that’s an important point that this is part of the occult aspect of the entire Marxist project. It logically follows that somebody like Dugin, who’s really a recruited KGB official or agent, would be proposing sexual inversion in one of his earlier works.
Benesch: Hitler worked with the aristocracy, the high level aristocracy, but he thought of them mistakenly as weak. He thought they had lost the drive. And he especially hated the Austrian aristocracy because to him, they messed up the whole Roman tradition. You know, if you go to Austria, to Vienna, you see these large Roman style temples and everything. But Austria was weak for quite a while. And so Hitler thought this new Nazi movement would bring a new level of strength and a new level of occultism, because these old timers, he thought they had lost the drive.
And I think that with communism, there’s like a parallel to this. They believe that Russia was weak. Russia had lost its zeal for power and transformation. And so they wanted to make something really big happen back in those days. So this Lunacharsky became popular again after his death in the 1960s. There was a surge of enthusiasm for the occult in Soviet society, and Lunacharsky was particularly interested in the Greek mystery schools. And now these scientists have looked at this and they found some objects that depict some of the things that went on in these mystery schools. But we do not have any clear text about what they were into. And they had these very strict rules. If you talked about these secrets or wrote them down and handed it to somebody who didn’t have the clearance for it, this meant you would be killed. They would kill you if you betrayed those secrets. So you couldn’t put this into a magazine. And some of the scientists, they have found fragments of psychedelic drugs in these old containers and even in old in old skeletons, in tooth cavities, they actually found traces of psychedelic substances from a fungus.
And some of these cults they even used special types of mushrooms. So this is like LSD, this is like DMT, these alkaloids, you get on to this stuff and you have a ritual. This is going to leave an impression on you and some of these substances they can permanently alter your brain. New research has shown that even when people have taken this stuff a year ago, there is still a change in them. They are still different from that one experience they had a year ago. Now, if you have a repetitive experience on these drugs mixed with these occult believes, that of course, makes it much more powerful.
Nyquist: It’s the performing of these spooky little metaphysical things like we mentioned before when we talked about Hitler in the Third Reich. Hitler drew a magic circle around Germany in his aggression. For example, he first moved east into Poland. That was his first invasion, then north into Denmark and Norway. Then west into the low countries and France, then south into Yugoslavia and Greece, and then completing the circle by going east again against the Soviet Union. So he, in his aggression, followed a perfect counterclockwise, not clockwise circle. I’ve heard people say that the swastika spins clockwise. But actually, if you look at the fact that the if the wind is bending back, the broken cross from it’s twirling is moving in a counterclockwise motion, and that that is sort of the motion in which he actually moved his forces. Was this intentional, subconscious or some kind of demonic force guiding this process? I mean, it’s bizarre, but when you look at Dugin, he claims that Putin has two bodies. He he refers to this guy, Ernst Kantor, which is the theory that a monarch has two bodies.
And then he claims that that there’s a corporal body and a mystical body and, you know, indulging in this horseplay, he borrows from Catholic theology to draw a magic circle around Putin and this is a is sort of a black magic operation. And so Dugin tells this one interviewer: This mystic body of Putin is linked with the Russian mission, with the logic of Russian history.
And sometimes Putin gives the sign that he is in direct connection with this imperial dimension of Russian history and its apocalyptic dimension, which is a sacred, holy dimension of our destiny. These are Dugin’s exact words and holy apocalyptic idea.
Benesch: There’s also this parallel, I think, between Hitler and Putin, because they made some really strange decisions in a military sense. So this is when Hitler’s generals became frustrated because they couldn’t make sense of Hitler’s orders. And also when Putin came up with this plan of attacking Ukraine, even Western American generals were commenting on it and said, this just didn’t make much sense from a military standpoint. You know, normally when you do an invasion, you need a certain size of the force, you need air superiority.
You would do it like this and like that. And so there were these weird choices that Putin made and also that Hitler made. And so the only real explanation that’s likely is that they are going off of some kind of an occult script because they view that as more important as what the generals are saying.
There are so many examples of this, when Hitler was messing up the war production, with these weird orders. Albert Speer, who at that point was responsible not for the architecture, he was responsible for the war production. Speer couldn’t make sense of it. He he would say this is completely wrong. This is exactly the other way around, as it should have been done. What is he doing? What is Hitler doing? What is his script?
Nyquist: The old black magician, Dietrich Eckart, actually gave a hint. He said that after a bloody war of annihilation against the United Army of the trolls, there’ll be a magical transformation. So they’re going to do this war of annihilation and all these people are going to die, and there’s going to be this heap of burning bodies. But it’s the United Army of the trolls. And you have the same kind of logic here with Putin threatening Europe again and again. In fact, Putin is is now just issued the idea that Russia is this innocent victim and we’re going to annihilate Ukraine and then we’re going to move on.
He’s basically, you know, implied that as well. If you listen to the Tucker Carlson interview, which is so fascinating, Carlson acts as if Putin wants peace. But Putin does not affirm that, he doesn’t really say anything about that. And what’s really extraordinary, what you brought out before about Putin, you know, altering the transcript when basically Carlson is trying to ask Putin a leading question. Saying, well, you’re innocent, right? NATO’s threatening you. And Putin said: Are we just trying to do a show here? Are we being serious? And then they removed it from the transcript. Well, well, not only was was Tucker Carlson trying to ask a leading question to help make Putin the good guy, Putin wouldn’t be the good guy.
Yeah, he said Ukraine doesn’t exist. He affirmed it’s a genocidal war to destroy Ukraine, which was amazing. A slap in the face of Carlson and an amazing admission that he is on this this apocalyptic mission.
Benesch: The setting of the interview with Tucker Carlson and Putin, was the Kremlin palace. And the Kremlin palace has these different grand rooms that are named after czars and people of that of that status.
Nyquist: They were in Molotov’s office. The guy that made the Molotov Hitler Ribbentrop pact. Molotov, The foreign minister of the Soviet Union.
Benesch: This is when Tucker was not getting the plot. Why are you saying these things for half an hour? And Putin was describing history while sitting in the Kremlin palace, which gives the visual message of this grandiosity and the tradition that goes back quite a long time. And also when Putin was in Germany, this was in the year 2000. Putin came to the German Reichstag building, the parliament in Berlin. And he gave the speech and part of it was Russian and part of it was German, because we know Putin speaks German because he was stationed with the KGB in Germany at some point. And so he was talking about, just like with Tucker, these old czars and other figures that were tied to Russia’s history and also German history in the high level aristocracy.
This is this what he’s really into. He was talking about this in the year 2000. That’s 24 years ago. And that’s why he talked about this in the Tucker interview, because that’s what he’s into. This level of of grandiosity. Russia had serfdom until 1861. So the average Russian citizen had almost zero rights. And it was very much in the tradition of the eastern Roman Empire in the ancient world. And the science is very, very superficial on this because they only talk about Freemasonry coming into Russia at some late stage in the game, and at some point Freemasonry was banned and all that. But Freemasonry was just one group. This came out of, first Scotland and then Britain originally. But Masonry, of course, is also based on much, much older things. Freemasons want to be in touch with, you know, the ancient world and they want to be the cutting edge at any stage in time.
They want to be on the cutting edge of things and not miss any grand discovery. And they always want to find some old thing, you know, they’re always looking for something. When somebody wants to figure out if somebody else is a Freemason, they ask the question: Are you a traveling man? And if the other guy is a mason, he will say something like, I travel from west to east and from east to west again.
And then the original guy has to ask: In search of what? And the other guy has to say: In search of what was lost. They’re always looking for something old, so they can use it to make something new. And so the scientists are so tame on this because they look at this from a very, very superficial standpoint.
And all this occultism was always mixed with espionage at all stages.
Nyquist: But what’s really interesting is that Hitler and the Third Reich were anti Masonic. Yeah, and so are the Russians. And that’s a very interesting detail. And, and there is also this eurasianism. A former KGB officer told me back in the 1920s Hitler was advancing eurasianism, because you have eurasianism in in Mein Kampf.
Karl Haushofer was a member of the Thule society, an associate of of Dietrich Eckhardt. I believe he had traveled to Tibet and had some eastern mystical knowledge. Dugin was using Eurasianism.
He was picking this as if right up off the ground of the Nazi eurasianism and adapting it to his fourth political theory and his battle of the one world island. The final war of the world island is a great landmass against Oceania, against the naval powers. It’s like Athens versus Sparta or what he would call it, Rome against Carthage, you know, and he appeals that Carthage must be destroyed.
And he means America when he says Carthage, by the way. There’s also the Pamyat thing that Dugin was into. His biographer Heiser pointed out that Pamyat is an anti-Semitic Russian organization, conspiracy minded, that was supported during the late Soviet period. It was supported by, according to Heiser, highly placed individuals in the Central Committee, the KGB and the armed forces of the USSR.
And it appears that experiments were then taking place throughout the USSR, and in the 1980s it was an attempt to integrate these far right ideas with Marxism-Leninism.
Benesch: I did this study of 200 years worth of conspiracy media. And one part of that was the eighties and nineties in Germany. So I looked at all the important books that came out here. And what you could notice was that they were trying to to combine the east and west already. They would always take material from America, specifically the John Birch Society. And then they would merge it with Nazi mysteries, all these postwar neo-Nazi mysteries and of course aliens and UFOs.
So you would get these John Birch Society books in America that tried to appear modern and legit. But these German authors, they would literally copy whole sections of these Birch books from America and then add all this crazy German stuff to it. And we talked about this before, this interesting parallel where you take the Birch Society conspiracy literature and then you take stuff from the Pamyat movement and also from older Leninism.
And it’s oddly similar because the Birch Society also viewed the gilded age of American industrialism as a conspiracy, specifically the conspiracy that was controlled by the Rothschilds, the Jewish bankers. And so this was sort of the similarity between the American conspiracy books and the Russian stuff, because there were many people who believed that the Western conspiracy was so bad, it was much worse to them than the USSR.
And we had real life traitorous moles like in the Navy, this John Walker guy, he was a Bircher. He was into the Birch Society literature and he sold out to the Soviets. He said he thought the USSR was far less bad than the Western conspiracy.
Nyquist: There’s this synthetic attempt to merge these right wing anti-capitalist, anti-Western themes with Marxism-Leninism, because they have the same enemy. They both oppose the capitalists or liberal elite in the West. And so the Soviet infiltration of the right goes back to the Nazi period when they saw Hitler as the icebreaker of the revolution. Then the manipulation of neo-Nazi groups throughout Europe, after World War Two. Now you look at Golden Dawn in Greece.
They have this deal with the communists and they both are supported by Moscow. That’s a convergence of the far right and the far left.
Benesch: Nowadays, you have new new occult orders in Germany, very right wing, and they love all the Knights Templar mystique and all that stuff. And we have evidence that, these new orders in Germany, they are pro-Russia, and they’re also tied to the right wing AfD party. There was also some evidence that linked the AfD Party to a man, a a Baron von Finck. So he had a legit aristocratic title. He died a few years ago. This Baron von Finck may have funneled money to the AfD party. And so I looked at that family, the press mostly focused on that guy’s father, the older Baron Finck, because he was a Nazi. But I also looked at the grandfather because he was moving in those circles in Hessen, Darmstadt, which is one of the most elite families, you know, you could get in German aristocracy.
And so he got his aristocratic title from these circles and also his banking career. The House of Hessen is basically the British throne. So there’s a connection to Britain. And we know that the British aristocracy is compromised or has a weird relationship with the Russians. This is in books like War of the Windsors.
They talk about Lord Louis Mountbatten and his Soviet contacts and how he messed everything up for Nato. Louis Mountbatten’s guy became the first ahead of Nato. This was Baron Ismay. And so people started to notice, British intelligence, French, the FBI, everybody noticed that Lord Louis Mountbatten was compromised by the Soviets, his whole family is compromised by the Soviets, and he messes everything up for NATO.
So you still have these aristocratic families running around and they’re just like this this guy I mentioned earlier who was named in the book “The Occult Roots of National Socialism”, this one aristocrat who funneled money into these right wing orders, this Novo Ordo Templi or what it was called. So it’s the same thing is happening today that was happening in the 1920s and thirties.
Vyacheslav Menchinski was head of the OGPU, Soviet intelligence from 1926 to 1934. He was the most important Bolshevik with occultist links before the revolution. Part of the circle around s Satanist cult. Expressing views that resembled Dugin’s. But still somebody like Alexander Dugin was not allowed into these higher levels yet because the Soviets were keeping this stuff in a very tight group. And that made Dugin angry. And it took a long time, decades until occultism became a bigger movement.
And Dugin finally got what he wanted, an international movement of this stuff.
Nyquist: Menchinski created operation trust. He was extremely important as a Cheka or GPU strategist. The idea of creating controlled opposition. One of the formulas of Marxism is to destroy things by by changing their nature. And also in occultism. And you have this in the 1980s, the KGB intentionally infiltrating neo-Nazi groups very intensively.
Tremendous efforts were made to synthesize Far-Right ideas to exploit their anti-Western properties. For some future purpose. Because, remember, the Soviet Union was planning to kind of go away, but not under the surface. The neo-Nazi right and the right in general was just a thousand splinters. Well, the KGB was asking itself in the 1980s:
How do we bring all these splinters together into one and then how we merge it with communism at some future date. And I think that’s what we’re on the verge of seeing right now because I’ve noticed this for almost two decades.
I’ve been expecting this. I’ve been expecting what we’re seeing with the AfD party or what’s happening with MAGA. I’ve been expecting this because I’ve seen the actual preparation for it. You know, if you really are paying attention to the communists and to the Russians, you can see that they’ve been working on this a long time off and on in this left right convergence strategy, which of course takes years or decades to develop it.
Putin is reaching out to the far right. Thus we get, you know, Carlsen’s interview, the only interview that Putin has given since the war began two years ago in in Ukraine. He’s given it to this right wing American. And it’s this playing to the right and it’s no accident. Then Dugin’s fourth political theory attempts to ideologically combine the themes of the right and the left by focusing on the enemies of both, which is the classical Western liberal center.
Benesch: Dugin is tied to this Konstantin Malofeev and he’s been involved in financing fighters. Apparently he’s on a sanctions list now, for stuff that happened in Ukraine, you know, years ago. And so there’s emails leaked almost every couple of months. Where you can see that Dugin is working with Konstantin Malofeev, who is a fan of the czars.
And they are inviting AfD party members and others to these special meetings. They’re inviting these French politicians and these Italians who love Putin, apparently. And there’s always occultism in it. the Italians, they’re into Julius Evola and into everything. So this is sort of the network that has been built for a long time.
And nowadays you see in Germany demonstrations where you have a mixed crowd, these extreme right wingers and communists and esoteric people. And some of these journalists are scratching their head. They can’t figure out why these people would actually function together. But if you look at Helena Blavatsky, for example, Helena Blavatsky started this movement that at a later stage branched out to target not just a right wing audience, but also a left audience. It became popular in Britain, and Britain has these weird links to the Russians. Guys like Ouspensky .
There’s all these connections with Ouspensky’s lectures. They were attended by people such as Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, Gerald Heard and others. Lady Rothermere, the wife of Harold Harmsworth, the first Viscount Rothermere, a press magnate, was willing to promote texts from either Ouspensky or Gurdjieff.
And in Istanbul, Gurdjieff also met his future pupil, Captain John Bennett, the then head the British Directorate of Military Intelligence in Constantinople. So there’s always this weirdo connection to the Brits, and then they get into America where we talked about this before, when I met the retired two star general, Albert Stubblebine, who was always a military intelligence professional, very much an anti-communist.
And he was so frustrated after Vietnam because all these young soldiers died and he couldn’t figure out why it went so bad. Only later did the moles get exposed, responsible for that. So Stubblebine was depressed. And then he gets into these circles from these people, Aldous Huxley and others, and these circles, they try to get into the American military and get these people, get them into psychedelic drugs.
I believe that Albert Stubblebine took psychedelic drugs because he was depressed. And then he gets into all this stuff. They called it the First Earth Battalion, these Rainbow warriors going through walls and all of this stuff. They tried to get into everything. Literally everything.
Nyquist: And so Dugin, the ultimate black magician in Russia, ultimately has become an advocate of war. And he likes to quote Heraclitus in saying that war is the father of all things. But there are some more quotes from Dugin’s works. And I’m going to quote a couple of these things in the context of this.
I mean getting people to use drugs is a way of poisoning their brains, right? He says: If the European New Right chooses us, the Russians, that means it chooses the barbarian element and therefore it must choose our methods of action, which are of course extreme violence. And then Dugin explained, you must take a knife and kill someone on the streets in the evening; kill at least one yank. And then he added: I do not know whether any of the new right activists have ever been under artillery siege. But our people do not only go to meetings and fight at barricades, they also go to real wars.
For instance, in the eastern district of Moldova or Yugoslavia. The new right is only a project. We are its architects. The future truly is ours. So Dugin is saying the new right is our project. We have created it. It’s adopting the Russian formula of violence. And then he said and he got in trouble in 2014 when the Euromaidan revolution happened.
He said today’s Ukrainians are a race of degenerates. They crawled up from the sewer. Genocide is in order. This is what Dugin said. And then he said, Kill, kill and kill the Ukrainians. We must kill all Ukrainians.
Benesch: We get so many Ukrainian refugees. In my little town here, you would go out on the street and you would hear people talk Ukrainian. And and if you look closely, you know, you can tell they’re Ukrainian, but it’s it’s like they look like most people here. So for the Russians, the Ukrainians are too white.
And this is something that the Americans need to understand. Now, this whole new right wing thing in Europe is is virulently anti-American. So I used to get hate mail because of my pronunciation, because I have American relatives, because we sell American brands. I’m wearing American clothing. This is 511 tactical. This is an American clothing brand that we sell. So we get a lot of hate mail for that. And I keep telling people, you know, so Americans have German roots. Like 40 to 50 million Americans have German roots. What are you talking about? But it’s so crazy anti-American.
And people have really no idea about Russia in this day and age. I asked my mother recently, she’s about 66 years old. I’m 40. So I ask her, tell me, how did you follow this whole Cold War thing back then? And my mother said, I didn’t pay that much attention. And so that made me think because I was born in 1984.
So I was a little kid in the eighties at the height of the Cold War. Had I been born in 1974, I would only have been a teenager in the eighties, so I wouldn’t really have noticed much about the Cold War. If I had been born in 1964, I would have been a full adult at the height of the Cold War.
And then I needed to read books. I really needed to get into this topic. So nowadays in Germany, you’re either too young to have experienced the Cold War, and if you’re at least 60 years old, you needed to actually get into this consciously. So now we have three generations of Germans that have absolutely no idea about Russia and the Cold War.
In 1989, the wall came down, so people stopped caring altogether. Why should we get into this? Why should we learn about the KGB and the Soviets and the moles and everything? Why should we care? It’s over. So people stopped caring altogether.
So we have three generations of clueless people now. I’m 40 now. Now we have the 20 year olds who are adults. Nobody knows anything about Russia, let alone the crazy stuff.
Nyquist: I remember during the Cold War being in graduate school and in a seminar saying the Soviet Union is a dangerous enemy of the United States. And this this man, fellow graduate school, in his mid-twenties, became enraged, put his face right up against my face and screamed at me: You’re insane. At the top of his lungs, right in my ear, in my face. And all I said was that this and this was just so to give you an idea what it was to be a cold warrior.
Even during the Cold War, it was controversial and considered not right in polite society. So it was even amazing that we could uphold our defenses even then, because you remember in the seventies, after Watergate and after they dragged the CIA through the mud and they called our soldiers, back from Vietnam, the baby killers. I remember being a marine in training in Virginia, being in a restaurant with all my buddies on Liberty from training and we had to get up and leave the restaurant because they were calling us killers.
This is 1978, three years after the fall of Saigon. They were still calling us baby killers right? So this was the whole way it worked back then. People don’t realize. And of course, we let our military go to the point that Russia was tempted to nuke us off the map back in the early eighties.
Benesch: And imagine at that time, what would the truthers have said to you and your guys? They would have told you you are a tool of the globalist Jewish banker conspiracy. You went to Vietnam because of the Jews or something. So it’s not just the leftist group.
Nyquist: Tucker Carlson was on with Lex Fridman, showing what a vacuous man he is. I mean, he is so empty. He says to Lex Fridman: Many people have made money off this war. I mean, what does that mean? What does that have to do with the Ukrainians suffering this invasion? This is ridiculous. I hope somebody makes money and gives them lots of really good weapons.
Right. To stop the evil of this invasion. But no, that’s his vacuous statement.
Benesch: Maybe someday we’ll find out why exactly the CIA refused the application of Tucker Carlson back then. Could it be that he was into LSD, maybe that he was into these crazy circles of music?
You know, sixties music. Well, was that the reason CIA refused him? Or was it the dyslexia? So he can’t read?
Nyquist: If you’ve seen the whole Alex Fridman interview, Carlson says I don’t know why NATO exists. We need to get out of it right away. Does he understand? Let me just for the audience explain how destructive this is, how stupid it is. If the US got out of Nato, Nato would collapse, Russia would own Europe. It would just be a fact. Just because our nuclear umbrella would no longer protect them, they have no real protection and no real support.
And if that happened, the same thing would happen to Japan and South Korea and Australia in the Pacific. So we’d be all alone. Latin America’s gone with Russia and China, so we’d be all alone. And by the way, no one would use the dollar as a trading currency. So, so trillions of dollars that are being used as trading currency around world would come flooding back to the United States and the hyperinflation would make what happened in Germany in the twenties look like nothing.
I mean, our economy would be leveled immediately.
Benesch: According to truther logic, America is an occupied country and the occupiers are the elders of Zion. So we need Russia help to liberate it. So in truther logic, it makes absolutely sense that Russia takes over Western Europe, gets access to all the German industry, and then uses that that enlarged empire to then take over America.
In truther logic, that would be a liberation. And if people talk about, you know, the Illuminati and all that stuff that they don’t really understand because they don’t know German history and European history, what do these people believe the Russian guys are doing in their palaces? I mean, have you seen these palaces, the old ones and the new ones they built? What do you think they’re into? I mean, all this ancient stuff and occult stuff. That’s what they love. And you want these people to liberate you?
Nyquist: I will quote Dugin again. The new right is only a project and we are its architects.
Benesch: Dugin was talking about Europe becoming a protectorate of Russia.
The conspiracy movement believes that Satanism and occultism and mystery cults are Jewish. As if Jews had invented this or they’ve invented a special something or whatever. The czars were into the occult, the Communists were into the occult. And in the post-Soviet phase, there’s more occultism.
These occultists are supposed to help you to liberate yourself from occultists? I mean, am I missing something here? The famous film director Sergei Eisenstein basically invented modern cinema, propagandistic cinema. And the Nazis learned from this guy. You know, all the Leni Riefenstahl movies. You can watch Leni Riefenstahl movies about the Nazis on YouTube. And even the bigger Hitler speeches, they all took this stuff from the Soviets. And so film director Sergei Eisenstein was a Rosicrucian and so were more members of the art scene in the Soviet Union. They were all occultists. They were in the same lodges, and there were other orders of that nature. And so it became a bigger and more broad phenomenon in the Soviet Union when Stalin died.
But then Brezhnev introduced stricter measures again, against these local groups. So they wanted to keep it in a tight circle. Then there was this underground movement, people like Dugin, they were not so high yet in the hierarchy at that point. Dugin wanted to partake in this elite occultism.
So he was part of the underground. And these people, circle that Dugin was in, they almost drank themselves to death. They tried most likely all kinds of drugs. Members of that circle died from some of their crazy ritual stuff. And so then this Pamyat movement came along that you mentioned, and they were very right wing, very conspiracy minded. And so that made them compatible to Western circles.
Nyquist: The KGB, the Central committee in the Soviet army were behind this project.
Benesch: So now we see Tucker Carlson interviewing Putin. Putin plays the czar, but he also sneaks in communist Leninist arguments and narratives. There was an early infiltration of the Western conspiracy movement. If you view the Gilded Age of American industrialism as a Jewish conspiracy, then everything is a conspiracy.
Xerox is a conspiracy. You know, the steel companies are a conspiracy. The oil companies, cars, everything is a conspiracy. So you have to fight everything. You have to fight it all. And the banks, you know, everything, government, everything is conspiracy. Everything is occupation. And you have to rise up and be a rebel and just destroy this this system.
This was the truthers. And this was also what the Russians were saying. And it’s baffling to me that it wasn’t obvious to people in America with the Birch Movement, the John Birch Society. They claimed to be the best anti-communist group on Earth. Nobody was better than them, they said. But they were attacking Eisenhower.
Nyquist: They were fingering the capitalist elite as the real enemy. The insiders. Well, the Jewish bankers, it comes down to it. But they wouldn’t say that because they didn’t want to be labeled as neo-Nazis or anti-Semites. So Robert Welch was careful about that. But if you read Oliver’s memoir, it basically says in his memoir that he and Robert Welch believed in the same thing, which was that the Jews were the problem. He said Welch wouldn’t come out and say it. He would hide that fact. Oliver famously in his memoir calls Robert Welch the Welcher. The founder of the John Birch Society. You find that that Robert Welch employed people like Willis Carto, the famous anti-Semite, neo Nazi American publisher, who published Francis Parker Yockey’s Imperium, which was dedicated to Adolf Hitler, the hero of the Second World War.
He had Taylor Caldwell writing for him, an Irish-American novelist, and Anti-Semite. He would take the stage with Westbrook Pegler, another American anti-Semite journalist. I mean the associations of Robert Welch spell it out pretty clearly. I met the head of the John Birch Society, the president, who told me that it was a Jewish conspiracy of nine Jewish cobblers who rule the world through the banks and the Illuminati.
And this was the president of the John Birch Society 30 years ago telling me this. I’m having coffee and pie with him at a friend’s house. I just thought, this is just insane. The Russians, the KGB, realized this far right neo-Nazi stuff, right? It doesn’t die because it’s an idea. And there’s always people, the world, who have the romance of this idea that. And so if you can just energize those people, unite with them, revive them into networks and then create a movement and then draw the center away into the far right, into the far left, you destroy the center.
Then you got your scissor strategy, you’ve got the right and the left being under your control, and then you can destroy the whole.
Benesch: So post Soviet Union, well, at least on paper, when the Soviet Union formally was over, this is when you saw an explosion. An explosion of occultism in Russia and former Soviet territories.
This was the time that Dugin had been waiting for to create this big international movement. This is when books started to appear everywhere. Everybody could access everything. And then came, of course, the Internet. Everybody could access this stuff. And a lot of Crowley’s writings became very popular again in Russia. There were OTO lodges in Russia, a guy wrote novels similar to Tolkien, but, you know, with more occultism in it.
Someone sold 80,000 copies of Wolfhound, a novel which was turned into a very, very expensive movie in Russia. Then you had the black metal movement. This was all over the nineties, mainly Scandinavia, but there were always sympathies for older stuff and Russian stuff. So black metal is a genre which is overtly Satanist. Now this is not like the older rock bands that would just play with the imagery to provoke people.
They were really into Satanism. And so you had all these bands making music and they would always put stuff in it that was old, you know, the old mythologies. And that became really big in the 1990s. So people in Russia would travel to sites in the southern Urals, they call it the Russian Stonehenge; thought to be the home of the Aryans.
The Times of London wrote in 2018 there are 800,000 occultists and faith healers in Russia, but only 640,000 doctors. So you get this shamanic folk medicine everywhere. You can pay people to perform rituals so you can get a promotion or you could prevent accidents and that way of thinking. And this was Dugin’s moment.
Immediately in the 1990s, he started to network with European politicians and he was already calling for the merge of the right and the left. And I remember this book from the 1990s. This was written by two communists. One now runs one of the most influential alternative magazines, which is very pro-Russia, in Germany.
It’s very pro Dugin. They interviewed him multiple times. And the other author was a communist woman named Wagenknecht. She just started a new political party and she’s also very pro-Russia. And so these two people in a book in 1996 talked about how can we get communism back or how can we do something, you know, to help Russia?
And she was already advocating for national Bolshevism, which was Dugin’s concept of merging communist elements with nationalist elements. She was already on to the next thing while this other guy was not yet convinced of National Bolshevism. Now he is. So they were quick to seize the opportunities in the 1990s.
Dugin was into everything, he was into Julius Evola whose book Pagan Imperialism he translated into Russian. That sounds creepy already. Pagan imperialism. Then of course, the association with the Pamyat movement and Dugin co-founded, of course, the National Bolshevik Party with Eduard Limonov, who went to New York. Limonov was moving around in America and his New York acquaintances included Studio 54’s Steve Rubell and a Trotsky group, the Socialist Workers Party.
Now, Steve Rubell was the co-owner of the New York City Disco Studio 54, and Rubell hired Roy Cohn to defend his people in court. Dugin left the National Bolshevik Party in 1998 and then he created new projects and I think a new party. And yeah, publishing his foundations of geopolitics in 1997. He called the Waffen-SS and the Ahnenerbe an intellectual oasis in the framework of the National Socialist regime.
So why would he call it an oasis within the Nazi system? Because apparently the Nazis were not occult enough in a broad sense to him, because the Nazis kept the really crazy stuff in a tight circle. So it was the SS and the Ahnenerbe, which were really cool to him because Germany at the time it was oftentimes a very drab place.
So you didn’t have many spots in nature that would sparkle your imagination. It was very industrialized and it was very drab. But the Ahnenerbe was cool to him and the Waffen SS. They were creating the warrior elite of the future, they thought. And so you had to be specifically chosen for that organization, especially in terms of your family.
Now, if you were any regular German and you wanted to marry, you would have to prove who your ancestors were. We even found some of these Ahnenpässe in our records, about our ancestors, they had to prove several generations back that they were worthy of having children. So they had to background check you several generations backwards.
Dugin was working with the French, the Belgian guys. Jean-Francois Thiriart, they talked about a euro Soviet empire which would stretch from Dublin to Vladivostok and would also expand to the south.
Nyquist: That’s what Gorbachev called the one common European home. In response to the Tucker Carlson interview, Dugin put a big post on X and in that post he said that Tucker Carlson was a symbolic figure and he said that he is now the main symbol of those that hates Biden, liberals and globalists and who will vote for Trump.
And then Dugin says that Trump, Carlson and Musk plus Texas Governor Abbott are the faces of the looming American Revolution.
Benesch: Dugin was a guest on the Alex Jones show and Alex Jones was a guest on a program with Dugin, I think multiple times. In his earlier days in the nineties and the early 2000s, Alex Jones was trashing David Icke. He didn’t want anything to do in public with the Reptilians and multidimensional beings and all that. But over the years, Alex Jones became a fan of David Icke and he would also talk repeatedly about DMT, which became popular in the Internet age because you could order it online on these illegal marketplaces, sort of like an eBay hidden in the deep web or the dark web where you have these different listings of drugs and you can just pick some stuff, put it in your virtual basket, then pay in Bitcoin or whatever, and then you would get it via postal service. And so I think that Jones still denies that he has taken DMT or something like that, but he keeps talking about it. And he also talked on the Joe Rogan podcast, how he would get these hallucinations before he sleeps. So we can speculate that Alex Jones might have taken psychedelics and has become a part of that broader scene of Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson and also some of these other guys, these people from the 911 Truth movement who became sort of famous in the 2000s, some of them are signaling they’re into psychedelics. And there was this one guy, Adam Kokesh.
He had a show on Russia today, and he was promoting Ron Paul, who was very pro Russia and this Adam Kokesh guy would promote DMT on his YouTube channel when it was still somewhat tolerated there. And I think there was even a video of him using some sort of substance and letting people watch him experiencing that.
And so this became a thing. And so they do this in front of the audience, which believes everything they say anyway. The audience may start get into this. And this is exactly what Dugin wants, this is what Jordan Peterson is talking about, that people get back in touch with the mysterious and nature and these grander concepts.
And you’re supposed to hate everything that’s modern and left wing and whatever. And so you create this network of people, you create this movement. And they are all expected to use these drugs. Dugin was talking about how the modern person has a normal job and he’s on his phone and he watches movies and television.
But you’re supposed to be the opposite, you should withdraw from this general world. You should take these drugs and go into the forest and perform some ritual and then go out with a knife and kill somebody. Creating a terrorist movement.
And it’s interesting to see that when Dugin is such a fan of the SS and the Ahnenerbe. This directly plays into the hands of the left in America because the left is watching what the right is doing and they’re looking at this and they’re saying this is completely insane Nazi stuff. So that emboldens the Communists to be even more active and more crazy when they when they see that.
So this is galvanizing the left. They want to have their own revolution because they think have to preempt the right wing. You know, when people start talking about a civil war. This was on all these shows out there, talking about civil war, civil war and more civil war. This is exactly what Dugin and his people want.
I mean, it’s so obvious to us, we know Soviet history. We know the Cold War inside out. To us, it’s very, very clear. But these people like Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, apparently they have very little idea about the Eastern Bloc and very little idea about the Cold War. You know, even if they market themselves as experts.
Nyquist: In his book, he talks about modern violence and violence for its own sake, being the political rule that came through Nazism, communism in the 20th century. And this is a theme that needs to be expounded on. But I’ll end this with quoting Crowley saying that the blood is life and sacrificing to dark entities.
What these entities want is a perfect male child, maybe five years old, something like that. A smart, attractive boy. And that this is the most pleasing sacrifice that could be made. This is Aleister Crowley, writing in the book Magic and Theory and Practice.
This is from book four. There is a magical operation of maximum importance. The initiation of a new way when it becomes necessary to utter a world. The whole planet must be bathed in blood. That’s what it’s all about. The ritual human sacrifice, massacring people, drawing magical circles, doing this crazy metaphysical, dark mimicry, where they turn political actions into a giant ritual.
And in fact, when you look at someone like the political philosopher and sometimes theologian Eric Voegelin saying, this is dark stuff, Marx is like a magician. Hegel is is a magician. He says they are conjuring with their intellectual philosophical lies and deceptions, tricks. He calls them tricks. They’re tricksters, and they are creating something that’s very evil and they know they’re doing it.
They know they’re lying. And this is the same thing with Hitler. Hitler knew he was lying. He knew he was tricking people, you know? And of course, what did what ended up happening your country, Germany, was destroyed. It was just leveled. The allied bomber and the Soviet army coming in, everything was just incinerated in Berlin.
The artillery, the Russian artillery was just bouncing the rubble at one point. How many people died? How many Germans, what, nine million Germans died in World War Two, and half of them died in the last three or four months of the war, 4.5 million people because it was just a slaughter at the end. Just a slaughter. And it was foreseeable.
Yeah, it was tiny Germany, you know, against the United States in the Soviet Union and the British Empire. Good luck with that.
Benesch: I mean there’s many people now in America. They make minimum wage. They’re young men in, in fighting age, the typical age of a soldier.
And they’re constantly being told that you live in an occupied system, an occupied country, and you have nothing to lose because your life expectation is to keep working for minimum wage. So you can be part of something great, you can be part of something special. It’s better to fight for this weirdo revolution than to live as a slave and all this stuff that was used so many times before in various countries.
And now they’ve figured out the Americans because Russia and China, they stole all the data on Americans, you know, online data on social media, what people like to hear, what they believe. They have their people in psychology. So they know how the American family works and how the American mind works. So they’re telling you exactly what you want to hear, and they’re merging it with Americana. They’re merging this nonsense with, you know, George Washington and the spirit of 1776. They sell it to you that way. They package it in a way that you like, because even people that consider themselves American patriots, they know not enough about American history and they do not know about the other forces back in those days.
You know, how the French needed to sell stuff to the American rebels and some of the stuff that happened right after the revolution because the British seized military operations, but they continued the intelligence war indefinitely. So you have old British networks in America and the British are compromised, you know, with the Russians.
Nyquist: I will quote Dugin one more time. The New right is a project and we are its architects. And who’s we? The Academy of Sciences, the KGB, the Russian strategic structures. The Chinese are participating in this. So anyway, it’s been an interesting ride. We’ve covered a lot about the occult in Russia and how this fits together.
The one place you can resolve all these seemingly contradictory strands, the far right, the far left communism, atheistic communism and the occult. It all is reconciled in strategy because it is in strategy that that it it unfolds as an attempt at conquest, which is really what they’re after. They’re after power.
So, Alex, I want to thank you. I want to thank the listeners for being with us. I’m Jeff Nyquist in America. My friend here was Alex Benesch in Germany. Join us next time for another episode. Thank you for being with us today.
